What is a CMS and Why Your Current Project Probably Needs One

If you are fully immersed in the value of content management systems (CMSs), you probably already use one in virtually every Intuiface project you build.

This article is for those of you who are not yet using a CMS in your Intuiface projects.

What is a Content Management System?

So, precisely what is a content management system? A CMS is a system used to manage content. Great! Thatwas easy—next question.

Ok, let's dive deeper.

The general principle of a CMS is to separate content - text, images, videos, etc. - from the application displaying that content. By doing so, one can modify the content without having to change the application. In fact, a key benefit of a CMS is its ability to enable people with zero understanding of application creation, deployment, and management to control the content.

Except on rare occasions, CMSs now live in the cloud. The user interface of the CMS itself is essentially a website. You use the website to define and control the content, while under the covers is a data store that does the heavy lifting. Applications connected to the CMS are communicating with that underlying storage. This framework enables deployments of any size, as every instance of an application in the field can reference the same single CMS instance in the cloud.

Content management systems are often structured to reflect the target application's user interface. Users are literally assigning content to specific visual elements. I'll put this image here; I'll put that text feed there... In addition, many CMSs explicitly identify targeted devices in the field. You select the endpoints that will be associated with a set of managed content.

CMS advantages when using Intuiface

Now that you understand a CMS, let’s highlight its advantages for you as an Intuiface user. A structured approach and thorough planning are essential for successful CMS implementation.

A CMS enables you to deploy content changes easily

Using a CMS means you don’t have to redeploy an experience whenever you want to make content changes. Your experience will update every time the CMS updates, allowing for the dynamic update of digital content in real time. It happens automatically. There’s absolutely nothing you need to do in Intuiface!

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A CMS enables any user to make updates easily

Using a CMS allows anyone to control the content, even if they don’t know you’re using Intuiface. All content managers need to do is pull up the CMS in a web browser. A CMS streamlines the content definition and distribution process, enabling companies to enhance customer engagement and improve their marketing and sales efforts. The assumption here is that you’ve configured the CMS to reflect your project’s user interface, but once done, you can let any appropriate people make changes.

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A CMS optimizes your experience

By using a CMS, you can reduce the size and complexity of your experiences. The projects you build won't contain the actual content, so they'll deploy quickly. And since you’ll be making template-like experiences - i.e., you create the framework, and the CMS fills in the content - the resulting experience can be super-fast to build and easy to maintain. For example, if you want to create a zoo kiosk with information about 50 animals, you don’t need to create a 51-sceneexperience (one Table of Contents scene, fifty animal scenes). Create a two-scene experience instead. The first scene dynamically pulls and displays the names of all 50 animals. The second scene is populated with data about the selected animal. How much easier is that?

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CMS examples in the marketplace

There are boatloads of CMSs in the marketplace. Many organizations utilize CMSs for various applications, from digital signage to website management.

If you're reading this, there's a chance you’re at least passingly familiar with the world of traditional, broadcast digital signage. These solutions, of which there are possibly hundreds, literally call themselves content management systems. Their web-hosted CMSs define, schedule, and push content to the end points - i.e., to the actual displays in the field.

Then there's the world of website and mobile app creation. A good CMS ensures that content can be managed and retrieved conveniently for any website or mobile device.

Examples include:

Finally, there is a world of "headless" CMSs and solutions that don't call themselves CMSs but act like them. A headless CMS is a CMS focused entirely on data structure, independent of the application user interface. Examples include Contentful, Contentstack, and Directus. Solutions that don't call themselves a CMS but can act like one include Airtable and Kintone. Oh, and even Excel can be used as a CMS, in a way. We've been encouraging folks to do that for years.

Most of the CMSs mentioned above can work with Intuiface. For example, many Intuiface customers have used Airtable in the past. But Intuiface has its own CMS, and it will make you very happy.

Introducing: Intuiface Headless CMS

Intuiface’sHeadless CMS

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Let's start with that "headless" part. Remember, as mentioned above, to be "headless" means the user interface of the deployed application does not influence how the content is managed within the CMS. Unlike with traditional digital signage CMSs, knowledge of the target design is not required.

It is typically true that a dedicated project manager can play a vital role in coordinating CMS implementations. However, with Intuiface Headless CMS, anybody with content expertise can manage that content on the web, even if they have no idea Intuiface is being used.

This headless nature also means Intuiface's CMS permits a very data-centric approach. Content managers can create data structures in Headless CMS that reflect their world rather than reflect constraints imposed by an experience's design. The same Headless CMS base (we call the Headless CMS datastore a "base") can be used across multiple, completely different experiences with very different looks, not to mention there is no need for Headless CMS to be aware of which endpoints will be consuming the data.

To supercharge data structures, Intuiface Headless CMS introduces the novel notion of a "variant". This feature greatly simplifies the entry and management of data that can vary based on certain conditions, such as time of day or language. It's beyond the scope of this article to describe how variants work, but you'll find them critical to many of your experiences and a breeze to adopt.

But what about experiences that need resilience in the face of unstable network connections? If the CMS is in the cloud, doesn't it require connectivity at all times? This is the case for many CMSs, this is the case - but not with Headless CMS. In our case, a local copy of the cloud-hosted master is stored on each Intuiface Player device. The experience isn't actually pulling content from the cloud; it's pulling content from the local copy. The local copy, meanwhile, is synchronized with the master. Changes made on the web work their way down to each device - but if network connectivity is lost, an Intuiface experience can still operate as if the connection was live thanks to the local copy.

Learning to use Headless CMS

Regardlessof Platform tier, every trial and paid Intuiface account can use Headless CMS. The main difference across Platform tiers is the number of variants you can create and the number of content editors you can manage. Big picture, nothing prevents you from using Headless CMS in your next project.

If you're ready to get started, we recommend a visit to Intuiface Academy. There you'll find a complete introductory course dedicated to Headless CMS. It's free, covers all of the core features, and will set you up to create your own projects.

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Go to the Intuiface Academy Course: Managing Content with Headless CMS ➔

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Are you interested in going to the next level? Checkout our two-part Headless CMS deep dive. Watch as our product expert and Customer Success Manager, Sebastien Meunier, builds a project in real-time, giving you tips and tricks along the way. Watch the videos below:

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Considering how powerful and valuable a content management system can be, we wouldn't be surprised if you use one in your next project. Give Intuiface Headless CMS a try to see what you think.